Winston Riley, on trial for attempted robbery, took the witness stand Wednesday to say he called off the crime midway through it because he felt sorry for his victim.

?Now a six-member jury will decide whether to believe him.

?Riley, 28, of Bridgeport, is accused of trying to mug an 83-year-old Norwich woman in a Mohegan Sun parking garage elevator the morning of March 18, 2012.?Riley’s two-day trial in New London Superior Court ended Wednesday. Jurors will begin deliberating the evidence today.

?The attempted robbery charge is the most serious one Riley faces, carrying a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

?Under questioning from his lawyer, Tina Sypek D’Amato, Riley, who ran a successful cleaning business with his wife, testified that, the day before, he had lost $800 gambling at Mohegan Sun and returned that Sunday to try to win the money back. He admitted to having a gambling problem, saying he visited the casino five or six times a month and several times lost more than $1,000 a visit.

?On his arrival, however, Riley said, when he tried to withdraw money from an ATM, he found that his wife had moved money out of the bank account. He said he went to his car, intending to call her and ask her to put some money back in. Instead, he took a 40-minute nap in the car, he said.

?Riley’s visit to the ATM and his nap in the car were both recorded on Mohegan Sun surveillance video.

?When he awoke, Riley, said, his mood and his intentions changed. “I grabbed a knife in the back and decided to go rob somebody,” he said. “I can’t tell you why.”?The knife Riley grabbed was a six-inch carving knife sitting on the back seat of his car. He said it had been left in the car after he and his wife took it to a party along with a ham. There were still food remnants on the blade.

?Riley said he put the knife up his sleeve and walked into a nearby parking garage. He was wearing a sweatshirt with its hood over his head. He entered an elevator immediately after an elderly woman, although he denied singling her out as a robbery target.

?A few seconds after the elevator started moving, Riley pulled out the knife and took two steps toward the woman, a surveillance video shown to jurors recorded.?That’s when he decided not to rob her, Riley said.

?“I thought about my grandmother, and I would not want anybody to do that to her, and I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” Riley said. He said at that point he pulled the knife back toward himself.

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?But the woman, instead of handing over a purse hanging on her shoulder, instead grabbed Riley. Then, just seconds later, the elevator doors opened, and both Riley and the woman exited, with the woman holding his elbow.

?Riley first walked and then ran away, he said. He drove home, but police stopped his car in Madison and arrested him.

?Assistant State’s Attorney Stephen Carney said the woman is still traumatized by the event, and finds it difficult to ride in elevators.

?Carney said that Riley changed his mind about robbing the woman because she refused to cooperate, making his crime more difficult, not because he had a voluntary change of heart.

?“When she grabbed you, your plan was foiled,” Carney said.

?The jurors will have to decide whether Riley’s change of mind was voluntary or not and whether it came in time or too late in order to find him guilty or not guilty of the attempted robbery and larceny charges.

?“I’d like you to think, why did he stop?” Carney said in a closing argument to the jury. “She’s not willing to hand over the purse, and he’s not willing to stab her or use force to take it. … Ask yourself, if she followed the script, would he have taken the purse?”

?D’Amato, in her closing argument, admitted that Riley was in fact guilty of threatening and carrying a dangerous weapon. She said he wasn’t guilty of reckless endangerment, because he didn’t swing the knife in a menacing way.

?D’Amato said Riley called off the robbery because he felt sorry for the woman.

?“If he changed his mind because he felt that, you have to find him not guilty. You just have to,” she said.

?“For whatever reason, he planned on robbing someone. That’s horrible,” D’Amato said. “But the bottom line is he changed his mind.”

?“He’s got a big problem, a woman who’s not obeying, a door that’s opening and a casino full of people,” Carney told jurors. “He abandoned his effort for those reasons, not because he had pangs of conscience.”